All My Ancestors

It was a 1963 Chevrolet Impala SuperSport convertible, with a 409 engine. It was navy blue with a baby blue interior. I think the top was white.

I suppose as a female I shouldn’t have cared much about cars. But I did. I had a girlfriend whose brothers were proud of their mechanical skills and their restored antique cars, and I picked up some car knowledge from them. Plus this was the era of the original Mustang and the GTO, so there was a lot of car talk going around.

Additionally, I grew up in the Texas panhandle, where the highways are seemingly never-ending, disappearing off into those unreachable horizons, and vehicles are important. It goes without saying that the cars had to be powerful because things aren’t close together out there, and when you had to go to the neighboring town, like maybe sneaking off to see your boyfriend, you wanted to get there and back home in a reasonable amount of time. Amarillo, the nearest town of any size, was 2 hours away–we didn’t measure in miles, it was too depressing. Rather, we used time.

My grandad bought that car for my brother and I. I asked my brother once why he thought Grandad took us squirmy, loud kids fishing–understand that our grandad wasn’t the stereotypical warm, fuzzy grandpa–he swore like a sailor and he was probably more than a little bipolar. My brother said, “I think he liked us.” Leave it to my brother–a man of few words. So I guess Grandad bought us the car for the same reason.

I’ll never forget walking across the big round gravel driveway, out to the granary, and around to the back to see the car. There it sat out in the middle of the South Dakota prairie, a sort of enigmatic picture. The granary was ancient and held my great-grandfather’s carpentry tools. And then there was this gorgeous car. I still wasn’t clear on how I got so lucky, but I was willing to deal with the ambiguity.

I don’t remember how we got the car home to Texas. I guess we must have driven it all 640 miles home, but I don’t remember that as well as driving it back and forth to college. You couldn’t have a more impractical car than that one in this part of the world–it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Riding with the top down was almost an impossibility because you risked baking. Anytime it rained, of course, if you were driving at any speed, it leaked. But who cared? We were young and the car was fast.

My brother and I were driving home from college one night–actually early morning– through the back roads in rural Texas. From nowhere, there was a sheriff or a highway patrol–my brother got a ticket for going 121 mph! The thought of that gives me cold chills now, but at the time, we were pumped about beating our time driving home from school. That car could fly.

There are other special cars in my memory–the 1959 Bel Aire sedan I drove when I first got my drivers license at 14! And used it to break a guy’s ladder that was sticking out the back of his pickup the first time I drove it to the grocery store. I think this was the car that we had air-conditioning put in–it was a unit under the dash in the middle–it froze your shins if you were riding in the middle, but what a luxury we thought that was.

About 3 months after I went to college, Dad bought me a used Chevy of some sort–one time having to come pick me up at school and get me back somehow impressed on him that he needed me to have a car. When I graduated from college in 1973, he bought me a new car–the first new car I’d ever owned. I think he was a little disappointed that I wanted a Toyota Celica, but he got it for me since that’s what I wanted. My high school boy friend’s 1956 Olds 88 (the tales that car could tell!), my Grandad’s ‘48 Ford pickup I learned to drive in, with an in-the-floor shift, my brother’s first car that was a really a pick-up, a family Buick that kept catching on fire, my Uncle Larry’s’57 Chevy with Hank Williams songs on the radio, my grandmother’s circa 1954 purple Pontiac–all cars that are strong in my memory.

But they can’t top the Chevy SS convertible–I loved that car.